How do you find out rapidly which blogs are mentioning you or linking back to your recent article? If you are new to the world of online publishing you may still be trying to figure out how to search and be alerted when other sites out there are going to link or mention you or your web site. How do you track and monitor citations and link backs to you? Ego searching is the answer.

Ego searching is all about setting up a small set of blog search engines to search both for your name as well as for your main domain URL.

Here is my video on how to do it:

Robin Good explains how to do Ego Searching to discover who is talking or linking back to your site / blog

Ego-Searching - What Is It? + How To Do It

Fill English Text Video Transcription

Hi guys, here is Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and I am going to explain to you today how you can do ego searching.

Ego searching? Yeah.

Ego searching is all about searching for yourself and finding out who is talking about you, or your website, or your content on other websites.

Because, as soon as you start blogging and publishing your content online, sooner or later somebody, because they like you and sometimes because they want to duplicate your content, are going to pick up your name, the name of your website, or making actually a link back to your site which is the greatest thing that normally can happen to you.

So how do you do it?

Let's go check it out: you take your browser, and you go to www.technorati.com, OK?

1) Press enter, let's go.

2) And this is what you're going to see when you're there.

3) Then in the search box right here you're going to type your name in between quotes, just like this.

4) Then you will see here in the results that two hours ago on this blog there was a mention of Robin Good! And then on this other one there was another mention. And then another one here, that was one hour ago, and another one 19 hours ago, and so on.

So that's the first way to find out who's talking, or mentioning, or siting, or linking back to your site.

The other way to do it is actually to go and type the URL, the main one of your site, and that will also show you what is the total number of mentions, of links coming back to your site as well as, in chronological reverse order, the sites linking back to you: one hour ago this site linked back to MasterNewMedia, and then this other one, and then this other one we saw when we searched for Robin Good, and so on.

Where else can you you do this?

I advise you strongly you do this in Technorati, and you also do it in Bloglines where there is a special feature up here called "Search for citations". There you can do exactly the same stuff as we did just a second ago in Technorati, and get all the people mentioning Robin Good, all the links you have coming back, or you can use the URL.

And you can also use Google Blog Search, this one here, and again utilize the same approach: type your name or type your URL there and see all the mentions that you're getting back to your site.

That's all for Robin Good for MasterNewMedia.

Talk to you soon, ciao!